Update on my progress in figure drawing class. This woman may seem strange but really this is what she looks like. She has the most beautiful medieval face with a high round forehead. My cat Roshi is a tough critic:

My friend Anna and I went to Forest Lawn cemetery on Sunday to make some grave rubbings. We were looking for names that were also common words, which we recombined into new phrases. Anna had some really good ones, including, and I'm not kidding, "Twitty Valentine Love." Here are some of my results. I'm going to write a very French kind of artist statment about what I think these are about: monumentality, the symbolic register, the proper name as collective category, urban density, self-destroying practices in the buddhist sense as a prerequisite for collaboration and compassion. But first here are the pictures:

"As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death." -- Leonardo da Vinci

Not because I want to, but because I've had to, I've been experimenting with what's called a polyphasic sleep cycle. Basically it means that you sleep several times a day in small increments, and in the end you actually sleep less overall, but still feel rested. Leonardo da Vinci, crazy genius that he was, supposedly slept only fifteen minutes every 4 hours. No wonder he managed to become one of the world's greatest artists, engineers, and scientists.

My aspirations are not quite so noble. Mostly it's about being able to party while still maintaining my roles as a student, teacher, researcher, and lab monkey. Here's how it works. I come home from my daily duties about 6pm, sleep till 8 or 9. Then I go out with people who actually have free time, which means that the evening begins around 11 or 12, since they can all sleep in the next day. Okay, so, party till about 3 or 4am, then home again. Sleep from 4-8. Get up, rub red eyes, drag deadweight body to car, proceed through day's responsibilites. Repeat.

How long can I keep this up? My sister worked nights for years, and she actually split her sleep in two. Some at 7am when she came home, some before she had to go in at 11. She maintains it nearly killed her, and thinks she accrued a sleep deficit she'll never quite replenish. She did kinda wander around in a haze in those days.

But this method has allowed me to do all I need to do: plan for class, finish projects, drink prodigeously. Oh, and avoid dreaming (see previous journals). It also gave me the opportunity to join in the Girl Power (plus Steve) Midnight Normal Ave Robin Move on Thursday night. And last night I was able to act like a petulant child watching a man I was attracted to nuzzle his girlfriend, while at the same time rebuffing the advances of subpar dive-bar y-chromos who think if you're wearing a little eyeliner you'll fuck anyone who's mostly upright. It was a full night.

So here's my question, if da Vinci never slept, then how could he believe that a well-spent day brings happy sleep? And what in this world or the next is a happy death?

I'll hopefully find out tomorrow in the cemetery. I'll go rub graves, since nobody rubs me.

John Kerry! Too funny. Bush's home town newspaper says "You're Fired!" Okay, so maybe its a little scary that a conservative paper that endorsed W. in 2000 finds Kerry acceptable, but we all know our doubts already. It's just that when I heard this on the radio this morning, it gave me a hearty cackle! You gotta read the article, it's righteously indignant:

Here's an excerpt:

When examined based on all the facts, Kerry’s voting record is enviable and echoes that of many Bush allies who are aghast at how the Bush administration has destroyed the American economy. Compared to Bush on economic issues, Kerry would be an arch-conservative, providing for Americans first. He has what it takes to right our wronged economy.
The re-election of George W. Bush would be a mandate to continue on our present course of chaos. We cannot afford to double the debt that we already have. We need to be moving in the opposite direction.
John Kerry has 30 years of experience looking out for the American people and can navigate our country back to prosperity and re-instill in America the dignity she so craves and deserves. He has served us well as a highly decorated Vietnam veteran and has had a successful career as a district attorney, lieutenant governor, and senator.
Kerry has a positive vision for America, plus the proven intelligence, good sense, and guts to make it happen.
That’s why The Iconoclast urges Texans not to rate the candidate by his hometown or even his political party, but instead by where he intends to take the country.
The Iconoclast wholeheartedly endorses John Kerry.

(e:terry), your dream of my momma is spot on [inlink]terry,322[/inlink]. She would ride a snowmobile across a frozen pond, face death, and still come out cacklin'. It was a dream right? I miss my family. Now that school has started and my weekends have been full I haven't gotten to see them. I want to run to my momma and bury my face in her generous snowy bosom. I turned down a trip to visit them all in Ellicottville last weekend to lick my wounds. It would have been better to have gone.

Soon we will crosscountry ski to the moon, you and me (e:terry). and (e:matthew). and (e:southernyankee). and (e:flaccidness). And anyone else who wants to strap some plastic slides to your feet and face death on terror mountain. Really, it's more fun than it sounds, facing death.

It's funny that Terry wrote about dreams, since in lieu of having something else I want to write about here, I was going to write about mine. (It's actually my homework to write about my dreams, for my purgatorial Seminar in the Image class.) Basically, here's what's been weird in my dream life right now. I keep dreaming very literal dreams that are almost scenes from my real life, which I guess is currently dramatic and surreal enough to qualify for dream logic. Usually there is little real world correspondance in my dreams, but lately, it's like I'm continuing waking events.

But here is what is really weird. My dreams insist on being optimistic. In real life I'm realizing once again that pessimism is the safest route. Intensity from containment, and all. But my dreams stubbornly continue to hope. It's almost cruel. To demonstrate, I will tell you my dreams in a Munch and a Chagall:

How my dreams see my world:



How waking me sees it:



Usually we go about our day, burying our frustrations and fears, which then emerge in anxious dreams. I'm scuttering about during the day like a starved brown leaf, while my dreams are full of laughter and warm sun and the fuzzy hairs on the nape of the neck. Perhaps what I'm repressing is my tragic capacity to wish...